This application relates to pre-empting, target and weapon tracking, counteracting the attack of snipers by detection of snipers, or potential snipers, rapidly determining, assigning, coordinating, and transferring, the target information between anti-sniper systems, sniper helmet systems, other sniper equipment, or the sniper themselves. The sniper position information may be used by counteracting forces through target information sharing and/or by rapidly positioning a counter-sniper weapon. The counter-sniper weapon robotic arm may rapidly zoom, pan, and tilt a camera (infrared or otherwise as appropriate), based on target bearing, elevation, range, and wind condition calculations, immediately be moved upon sniper position to rapidly and accurately counter fire against any sniper or multiple snipers. Small human adjustments of pan, tilt, and zoom may be made upon human verification of target from rapidly zoomed camera. Pooled together, multiple systems may be designed to cooperate to nearly simultaneously coordinate, assign, and communicate target data and counter-fire on automatically or semi-automatically assigned multiple sniper targets in response all at once, where targets may be chosen programmatically (automatically or semi-automatically) optimally by relative unit positions. Targets may also be assigned based on terrain occlusions (e.g., based on terrain data from a terrain database), for maximizing safety of units based on these terrain occlusions from a terrain occlusion (one of sight from target) data base or calculation, and/or from system instrumentation of terrain (such as from three dimensional depth cameras). Snipers may be dealt with in multiple stages: pre-detection (includes IR/UV detection), barrel/glint (pre-fire) detection, fire detection (Infra-red and ultraviolet), bullet trajectory tracking, and fire return, as snipers come and go.
The combination of stereoscopic/spherical/depth (omni-directional) cameras as well as a spherical/omni-directional microphone system and a radar system may be used to measure target range. Other techniques to determine target range may be optic flow estimation, laser range finding, terrain database information or any other suitable technique. If a muzzle flash or heated muzzle may be detected optically, because the speed of light is much greater than the speed of sound through air, the muzzle flash and muzzle sound detection may be used to determine range by taking the time difference at the start of the muzzle flash from the start of the optical detection and multiplying it by the speed of sound in air of which may be optimized using air pressure & temperature sensors if needed. Sensor integration and synthesis may be achieved by weighting the probability of accuracy, precision, and tolerances. Many of these techniques are well known in the art.
Currently no anti-sniper system exists that provides a seamless response at every stage of sniper interaction from pre-detection, to pre-fire warning, target assignment, fire detection, trajectory tracking, to coordinated fire response, as well as neural-fuzzy reinforcement optimization.
It is with these concepts in mind, among others, that various aspects of the present disclosure were conceived.